ISI Prepares Party for Prime Pixel Patent

A modest celebration will take Nov. 3 at the
University of Southern California Information Sciences
Institute to mark the 35th anniversary of the filing, by ISI's
Peter Will and others, of the very first patent using the word
"pixel."

Will, who also holds appointments in two USC Viterbi School
of Engineering departments filed the patent, US3720875:
DIFFERENTIAL
ENCODING WITH LOOKAHEAD FEATURE, on November 3,
1971. He then worked at IBM.

A caption for one of the illustration notes: "Referring first to
FIG. 2, the varying shades in the successive elements of the
picture or image which currently is being scanned are
converted by conventional means (not shown) into video
code words that represent absolute grey-level values. These
video code representations contain a sufficient number of
bits per code word to represent the various grey levels of
the respective picture elements (or "pixels") with a high
degree of precision. For instance, if each of these code
words contains eight bits (one byte), this would enable one
to represent as many as 256 different shades or levels of
grey."

Will had previously used the word in an IBM report in
1970.
When he filed the patent, he and his two collaborators, Peter
A . Franaszek and David T. Grossman, had no idea that it
was the first to use the word.

Will found out
about the distinction early this year, when Richard F.
Lyon, now at Google but then chief scientist of Foveon, Inc, a
maker of image sensors, contacted him while researching a
history of the term.

Lyon had found that the term pixel, short for picture
element,
"was first published in two different SPIE Proceedings in
1965, in articles by Fred C. Billingsley of Caltech's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory."

Lyon's detailed history was presented in January at the
IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging and can be
found
here

The word was not Will's first choice: "I had visited Billingsley
years before so got it from him but I still preferred and
used pel and picture element because it seemed more
euphonious.

Lyon's history notes "an IBM colleague told Will that [pel]
was old-fashioned and he should use pixel instead. He
switched, but IBM mostly stayed with pel."